Microsoft recently released the Open Government Data Initiative website. The main objective of the OGDI is to publish and use a wide variety of public data from government agencies. OGDI is also a free, open source ‘starter kit’ with code that can be used to publish data on the Internet in a Web-friendly format with easy-to-use, open API’s. The data can be queried using the RESTful API (OGDI is based on the Azure Services Platform). The default format is the Atom Publishing Protocol but developers are free to choose JSON or KML for geospatial data.

The Data Catalog is currently rather slim but works as a testing ground for querys providing sample code for various languages like PHP, Javascript (jQuery & raw JS), Ruby, Flex, Silverlight among others. The Developers Page hosts documentation on the API’s query, format and paging capabilities.

We’re very happy to see public data getting this level of attention lately with Amazon, Google and now Microsoft stepping into this area. Making publishing data easy, secure and economic helps overcome some of the barriers in the way to open data utopia.